What caused the shift from medical photography into criminal photography?
It’s no shift at all. It’s forensics. When I originally collected photographs my idea was to collect images of all of the jobs that physicians do. One of the things that physicians did in those days was declaring a body dead after execution, and that’s how I got into the crime, and the forensics. Then I delved into the psychology of the killers and how crazy these people are. Do you ever find peculiar the fascination people have with images of death and crime? Well, you get terror fascination. A lot of the times these images are your nightmares. You don’t want to get hit by a car, you don’t want to be murdered, or get bubonic plague. So what the photo does is it allows you to look at these fears without really dealing with them. Also, when you are looking at these photos you look at them through the “safety net of time”. You are an eye surgeon, but I take it this has become your major work? I work six and a half days a week, about 12 hours a day on this. I couldn’t put out six books a
